Long wait is finally over. Oracle just released E-Business Suite R12.2 (General Release). This release signifies Online Patching and Enhancements Across Integrated Suite of Business Applications. For further details please refer to the official press release below.

Getting started

In 12.1.3, Oracle came up with Lightweight Multi-Language Support (MLS) feature to help environments to reduce significant overhead such as extended downtime in applying language patches, saving substantial amount of disk space associated to NLS patching. In other words, when using Lightweight MLS, you are not required to apply the time and resource consuming NLS patches.

Even though you cannot have both full and lightweight MLS for the same language, you can still have your environment fully patched with NLS languages co-exist with lightweight languages. Thus enabling hybrid language environment. Moreover, you can migrate any of your Lightweight MLS languages to full MLS using NLS patching at any given time. Additionally, 12.1.3 supports 34 languages.

Consider the spirit of Lightweight MLS as the “UI is in English, while the setup or customer data are shown in the relevant language”.

Nonetheless, Lightweight MLS do have its own limitations. Since you will be using English user interface and if your users prefer NLS translated forms and reports, LMLS may not be for you.

With lightweight MLS, Oracle provides a capability to enter and maintain multiple language data using English user interface, yet delivers the ability to display data in appropriate language. Users can use so called ‘globe’ icon in forms to enter the needed language data showed in below screenshot.

Steps

If you are implementing a new language, from System Administration ->Oracle Applications Manager ->License Manager, click on Languages under license, select the needed Language name and submit.

It’s highly recommended that you run the message synchronization script $FND_TOP/patch/115/sql/AFMSGSYNC.sql. Input the language code that you enabled in step 1.

Once done, restart the applications services via adstrtal.sh.

Behind the scenes

The R12.1.3 Multilingual Support (MLS) table architecture needs the multilingual tables to fully populate for all active languages. By running maintain multi-lingual tables option ensures that every row in the base table has an analogous row in the MLS table. This is applicable for all the active languages.

When you run the AFMSGSYNC.sql script, it first asks for the language that you enabled. It then reads FND_NEW_MESSAGES table to see if language data exists. If not, it synchronizes the language data in FND_NEW_MESSAGES table with the base language data in message directory. Additionally, lightweight MLS stores the translation data in the %_TL tables.

PS: If you already have few languages installed with NLS and prefer to convert those to lightweight MLS, all you need to perform is follow steps 3 and 4.

We had a good number of techies turn out at OAUG ConnectionPoint, Pittsburgh (no wonder this city consistently ranked one of the best cities to live in the world by Forbes, Economist,etc). Wide range of sessions across Applications Technologies is indeed a bonanza. Experts from Oracle Corporation shared details about Release 12.2 and product direction for the entire E-Business Suite technology stack. It was nice to see Steven Chan, Senior Director of Oracle Applications Technology Group provide Oracle’s road map on EBS. Elke Phelps and Vasu Rao from Oracle Applications Technology Group did yet another great job in attending such events and meeting with EBS customers. Such not so big events help you to have one-on-one sessions with key members within Oracle product teams. Ensure to take advantage of such opportunities.

Few standouts:

As many of you heard or continue to hear from Oracle about path to Fusion Apps via EBS, etc., we heard some interesting EBS Future direction directly from Oracle. Curious to know? In spite of Fusion’s evolution, Oracle will continue to put enough muscle behind EBS and will continue to evolve on its path. Hey, don’t shoot the messenger here 🙂

We started to hear back on EBS 12.2 after a long pause from Oracle. Until mid of last year, you might have seen quite a few R12.2 sessions such as online patching, Edition-Based Redefinition, 12.2 architecture and so on. Even though these sessions were highly educational, but it led to significant confusion among EBS customers. Especially with 11i customers, who started to think of skipping R12.1 to move directly to R12.2. Now that Oracle got majority of customers on R12.1, its back on track with R12.2. I bet, Openworld 2013 will have noticeable number of R12.2 sessions.

So another inquisitive topic is on EBS Mobile strategy. It was unclear about Oracle’s EBS mobile strategy. But the firm information that I received was making EBS mobile friendly on OAF via iOS form factors. In order words, making EBS Safari friendly. That’s the formative strategy Oracle has in place. Nonetheless, Oracle is still gathering information from its customers to determine Android strategy. Lets not forget the slowly yet steadily growing Windows RT platform. With the limited resources in place, I doubt Oracle EBS technology group gaining any traction on non-iOS platforms.

Another interesting product to watch is Endeca, an information driven navigation product. Stunning to watch the Dashboard type search results while you actually type the keywords. Oracle is promoting Endeca wherever EBS is in play 🙂

By the way, Oracle also pushing hard on Applications Management Suite, Advanced Security features.Inside info. Bargain hard on those products with Oracle and you will be surprised with the price point. We had few sessions on Fusion Analytics (including one from yours truly and Ramke Ramakrishnan). Was surprised to see very few customers run Fusion Analytics (OBIA).

Thanks to Pittsburgh OAUG for bringing ConnectionPoint to Pittsburgh.

That’s the short summary of me being at 2-day Connection Point, AppsTech. Please LMK if you have any questions related to it.

Planning to Upgrade to R12.1.3 in OBI Fusion Analytics environment? You may want to attend OAUG ConnectionPoint AppsTech conference that is scheduled on July 30 & 31st at Pittsburgh to get to the insights.

Abstract

Development Dimensions International is a global human resources consulting firm that helps organizations close the gap between today’s talent capability and future talent needs. Recently, DDI initiated a major global initiative that spread across 26 countries to significantly improve business decisions and strategic enablement of next generation reporting that has seamless integration with the global ERP applications. This session will outline the rapid deployment of Fusion Analytics in 11i and its survivability in R12 upgrade.

Bio: A Oracle Certified Professional with over 14 years of experience in multifaceted architectural design and implementation of mission-critical global Oracle Applications. He provides technical leadership to the enterprise project teams and manages the comprehensive implementation life-cycle. Sunthar has exhaustive hands-on competencies in vital Oracle technologies such as Oracle E-Business Suite, Databases, OBI Applications, Oracle Identity Management and Web Center suites.

Secondary Speaker:

Name: Ramke Ramakrishnan

Title: Partner, Oracle Business Analytics

Bio: A recognized leader in the industry; performing lead architect and technical leadership roles for over 15 years on Business Intelligence by effectively managing the project team and the business customer expectations. Over the years, ramke demonstrated hands-on capabilities in the configuration of robust Oracle database architectures, Oracle’s Essbase infrastructure and large scale Business Intelligence Reporting, OBI Applications and EPM implementations. Ramke is a key contributor for Business Analytics and Enterprise Reporting by integrating various applications systems into analytics to empower business customers, executives and end-users.

When Oracle introduced plethora of products and enhancements to its product portfolio, one key capability that was left out was In-Memory capabilities for Oracle applications on engineered systems. Looks like, Oracle EVP (for Applications Development) Steve Miranda’s group felt enough pressure to get the in-memory applications for all applications certified on Oracle Engineered Systems :). Timing cannot be any better as the announcement came right during Collaborate ’13.

So who all impacted by this announcement or who can take immediate advantage of the new toy?

Well, any customers who use Oracle’s Applications business products such as Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Oracle PeopleSoft, Oracle Siebel, Oracle E-Business Suite, and Oracle Hyperion can take advantage of it.

So what does this announcement mean to you and to your company?

Companies whose decision making impacted by their business systems capabilities, limiting employees productivity in manufacturing, shop floor operations, order processing, and customer service and more importantly companies that have inability to meet service level agreements and regulatory reporting needs.

Today’s Oracle announcement trumpets above mentioned limitations can become an history as the new foray of engineered solutions can help companies run business critical applications 10-20 times. Announcement further articulates how Oracle In-Memory Applications change business dynamics, helping customers quickly discover growth opportunities, make smarter decisions, reduce corporate costs, and accelerate time consuming workloads.

In other words, you now have an opportunity to strengthen your resume 🙂

What are the technical benefits?

Oracle’s Internal benchmarking indicates that Oracle EBusiness Suite running on Oracle’s Engineered Systems performs 3 to10 times faster for forms and self-service applications depending upon the concurrency load profile. And linear scaling allows for very large deployments and multiple applications to run simultaneously while maintaining consistent response times. Oracle’s Engineered Systems are architected to deliver maximum availability, high performance, and scalability helping Oracle EBusiness Suite customers to consolidate environments, and reduce server footprint resulting in an overall reduction in cost of application ownership.

Here are some of the technical benefits delivered by Engineered Systems:

Oracle EBusiness Suite applications consists of many batch processing programs that create large workloads. These workloads are highly CPU intensive. High concurrency of these workloads requires systems with large memory capacity with large Systems global area (SGA) and Program global area (PGA) capable of processing high speed disk input/output (I/O). Oracle’s Engineered Systems are architected to deliver these superior technical capabilities to manage such large workloads.

Engineered systems can handle twice as many users per core compared to other servers delivering the scalability required to add more application users during growth and expansion.

Exalogic has been engineered to leverage a technique known as SingleRoot I/O Virtualization to eliminate virtualization overhead and deliver maximum performance and scalability. Missioncritical server virtualization offers a whole new level of consolidation where multiple virtual machines are sharing a single physical server in order to maximize the utilization of server hardware, while minimizing associated cost.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control (EM) helps with Exadata manageability and provides a composite view of all health indicators of a cell or cell group to diagnose and troubleshoot performance problems efficiently.

In many instances, to get holistic view of concurrent processing in Oracle E-Business Suite we either use Applications Management Pack (AMP) or run several scripts and analyze the results to determine the health of CP. I guess the wait is finally over. Oracle has come up with Concurrent Processing Analyzer (CPA) for EBS, a solid tool that can give you not only a holistic view of concurrent processing, but also provides recommendations based on best practices that can fit the environment. Interestingly, this is a non-invasive script that can be run in production too.

Concurrent Processing Analyzer benefits are categorized into 4 and they are

Helps to identify concurrent system setup and configurations

Analysis and output of concurrent environment

Identifies and recommends concurrent best practices

and more importantly regular concurrent maintenance to compare trending.

Some of the benefits that we have realized by taking advantage of this tool are

Number of eligible records in FND_CONCURRENT_REQUESTS that can be purged.

Current list of patches in the system

Volume of daily concurrent requests

Request managers with Incorrect Cache size

Long running reports during core business hours

Based on current concurrent processing, it helps to identify possible bottlenecks with recommendations to resolve those based on best practices.

Here is a screen shot of the tool

To get comprehensive list of benefits that can be realized by CPA, please refer to MOS note